Grooming salon calendar & staff scheduling

Grooming days are not tidy. A bath and brush runs forty minutes, a matted full groom runs two hours, one dog arrives early and another does not arrive at all. Argus gives you a single day view with one column per groomer — their photo, their job title, and the hours they are actually working that day, so you can see at a glance who has room and who is buried.

Appointments that overlap sit side by side instead of hiding each other. The calendar opens scrolled to the start of the first shift rather than to midnight, and on today it draws a red line across the current time, so “where are we?” is answered before you ask. Colour comes from the service category, so a room full of small dogs and a room full of doodles look different from across the counter.

When the day moves, you should not have to open a form. Drag an appointment up or down to re-time it and the length comes with it. Drag it sideways into another groomer's column to reassign the job. Pull its bottom edge to give a difficult coat another twenty minutes. Everything snaps to quarter-hours, and a plain click — no drag — opens the full appointment instead.

• Drag vertically to re-time, horizontally to reassign the groomer
• Drag the bottom edge to change how long the job takes
• 15-minute snapping, with the change previewed as you move
• Multi-pet appointments are scheduled back to back automatically
• A globe marks the appointments your customers booked themselves

On a tablet the rules change on purpose. A finger never drags, because a scroll and a drag are the same vertical motion and one clumsy swipe should not move a customer's booking. Tap to open, and use a stylus if you want to drag.

Lunch, a vet run, a deep clean, a groomer leaving at three for a school pickup. Draw straight onto the empty part of a column and Argus opens a blocked-time note prefilled with that groomer, day and time. A reason is required — future you will want to know why the slot was closed — and the block can be dragged, resized or moved to another groomer just like an appointment. Blocked time is fenced off from online booking, so customers are never offered it.

Big coats and nervous dogs are often a two-person job, and Argus treats that as a first class case rather than a workaround. Add an assistant to any line and they get their own block in their own column, with their own start and end time — because an assistant usually helps for part of a groom, not all of it. Their share of the commission is set with a slider right there on the appointment.

Hover any block and every part of the same appointment lights up: each pet, and each assistant. On a busy Saturday that is how you tell a three-pet family booking apart from three unrelated dogs.

Scheduling lives on a weekly grid — your team down the side, Monday to Sunday across the top, each cell showing the hours that person works and a weekly total per groomer. Click a cell to set that day's hours, including split shifts for anyone who works a morning and an evening with a gap in between.

• Weekly staff × day grid with per-person weekly hours
• Split shifts — several separate intervals in one day
• Repeat a rota weekly or every other week, with an optional end date
• Rotas are written ahead of time, so next month is already filled in
• Each branch keeps its own opening hours, including split days

Shifts are what make online booking honest: a customer can only be offered a time when somebody qualified is actually rostered, at that branch, and free.

Running more than one shop is the normal case, not an upgrade. Switch branch from the calendar and the schedule follows; Argus remembers where you were and puts the branch and date in the address bar, so a particular day at a particular shop is a link you can send. Managers only ever see the branches they are responsible for.

Cancelling asks for a reason and keeps it. Every reschedule, edit, no-show and cancellation is written to an activity log with what changed, so “who moved this?” has an answer that does not depend on memory. And because a paid appointment is locked, your calendar and your till can never drift apart.